Race 2 - Day 17
Crew Diary - Race 2 Day 17: Punta del Este to Cape Town
21 October

Last night I imagine we all would have preferred to be safely in Cape Town celebrating our heroic passage across the South Atlantic with beers, South African wine, showers and crisp white sheets. But actually it was great to be still sailing during the hours of darkness.

There were no stars, just a solid covering of dark, ditch grey clouds, a strong breeze with sudden gusts and disproportionately high following seas. The foresail did not like our course and jerked to and fro, failing to match the power of our full mainsail, so the boat was not well balanced and the helm was heavy. So on the face of it, not much of a match for the bars and restaurants of Cape Town.

Helming was hard work: there was no respite from the constant need to bear down on the wheel with all your strength as the gusts unleashed their power on the mainsail, and then to dramatically reverse the wheel when the wind let up. It took a while to get orientated in the darkness, but even with so little to see, it is fatal to get fixated on the compass: much better to look up, sense and feel the movement of the boat: the first hint of a dipping prow against the smudge of the horizon and the tilting of the line of cosy red light coming up from the galley.

My hour at the helm was almost up and the ache across my shoulders and back was increasing when that magical combination of wind gust and rolling wave at our stern came. The boat started to heel and the prow to dip, so I heaved the wheel to starboard, again and again as the pressure grew. It feels like a battle but it is not. It is our attempt to harness the awesome power of wind and wave. I was managing to hold our course when the action of the wave changed; the boat started to level out; I wrenched the wheel sharply back to windward and it was like a sudden release:

The boat shot forward, the helm became suddenly light; all that energy that had built up between the helm and the sail converted into forward motion and phosphorescent spray leapt up from both sides of the prow. I glanced down to watch our speed increase from 11 to 13, 15 and finally 17.5 knots. Not an outstanding speed but the thrill and the sense of that brief moment when the awesome powers of nature and this little machine of ours are working so beautifully together is worth a glass of wine any night of the week!